Marshall Shaffer

For a film so fixated on provoking fear and dread through the medium of audio, it’s naturally strongest when it does not bother to stimulate the eyes at all.

There’s a floor for entertainment with a cast this strong, especially two leads who can contort themselves bodily and emotionally with such dexterity. But “The Bride!” spends too long operating at that level because it cannot escape the mire of confusion about its own identity.

Once the basic parameters of Franco’s thought experiment in Dreams are grasped, what’s left is an obvious parable about immigration with little to offer beyond spitefulness and a smugly superior sense of self-loathing.

The material’s dualities trap Ford between continents, not to mention genres and tones.

Frank & Louis slips into being a film that’s observed and admired from a distance, not experienced emotionally.

The film gets too caught up in concern trolling about the sexual timidity of today’s youth.

There’s a good movie about therapy and PTSD inside Jay Duplass’ See You When I See You. The trouble is, it’s buried in a so-so family ensemble film about shared grief and recovery.

Even the most hair-brained of Wain’s films have some quality elements, and Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is certainly no exception to that rule. But it’s nevertheless a slight disappointment to see a luminary operating at the lower end of his power and promise.

Wilde toils feverishly to create the illusion of momentum and communicates to the audience that they must be feeling such a sensation. But for all the belabored artistry of this choppily cut enterprise, little in “The Invite” actually moves. It’s potential energy, unconvincingly trying to pass itself off as kinetic.

If the people on screen only feel like characters, then no amount of creepy creature design or surprising twist can make a venture such as Perkins’ here register as anything other than an antiseptic experience.

The film ultimately feels like little more than hired hand work from Wright. What he lacks in compositional vision, he tries to make up for in clever casting (Colman Domingo, William H. Macy, and Lee Pace all deliver their best), as well as some simple gags. But like the people in Ben Richards’ fictional dystopia discover, amusing ourselves to death can only go so far. “The Running Man” settles for being good when, if the topline talent had leaned into their fortes, it could have been truly great.

Christy lulls us into complacency by deviating little from the standard inspirational sports-movie playbook.

Its desire to resist easy storytelling paradigms around artists is admirable, but without punching up or down, the film feels like it’s pulling punches altogether.

Law’s take on the Russian leader feels both real and mysterious — two features that the film otherwise struggles to corral across its unwieldy runtime.

Ballerina is passable as a continuation of “John Wick” mythology. However, it’s not strong enough to organically generate comparable enthusiasm for continued storytelling with this character.

When they can translate something into a tangible sensation, like the camera effects of focus that take viewers into Piper’s distorted field of vision, the film operates within a comfortable range for the directors. Where they struggle to locate resonance is in the emotional realm.

Hardly a false note is sounded throughout The Friend, but it operates within such a limited emotional range that it drifts into monotonic plainsong.

The film has no answers because Lin plays it more like a heist film—where the bounty is the purity of the unexposed North Sentinelese—than a sincere human drama about faith and identity. Lin entertains as a result but struggles to enlighten.

The Return may render its mythological figures lifelike through flesh and blood, but nowhere inside that viscera lies a beating heart.

Sora Neo struggles to balance the immediacy of adolescent angst with the long-range outlook of using the students’ experience as a canary in the coal mine for society at large.

The film’s lack of character development might not appear so evident were it not in such stark contrast with all the other elements of “Harvest.”

Given the unhurried pacing and general underplaying of the situation’s gravity, the film feels like visiting a museum exhibit rather than living through a flashpoint of history. Here, the past’s horrors are but pictures nestled safely behind glass.

It does not take much imagination to imagine a version of “Rob Peace” where, given the room to sit with events, Rob’s journey provides a damning X-ray of American society’s shortsightedness. But far too often, the film settles for simply conveying information through dramatization.

The drama in Downtown Owl often feels stilted and too locked in to Klosterman’s observations instead of the character’s actions.

The film is a mesmeric but frequently muddled exploration of transgender self-actualization.

Argylle proves hollow from the inside out.

[Boden and Fleck] re-emerge carrying some of the hallmarks of comic book cinema as well: an overemphasis on in-jokes, a sprawling web of larger-than-life yet flimsy characters, and a belief that a kick-ass fight scene at the end can overwrite many of the wrongs that came before.

The best that can be said about everything surrounding Powell and Sweeney in Anyone But You is that they mostly have the good sense to move the plot quickly and then let the stars sparkle.